Think about it

You should be eating a heavily weighted diet of plants and raw foods. I don’t want to hear the same old BS that we are meat eaters and should be eating red meat. That may have been true 100 years ago, but not know. Chemistry has gotten into our diet. Chemists have found ways to increase the yield of everything and haven’t thought about the long term costs until recently. If you don’t eat organically grown food you are ingesting 12 or more chemicals and pesticides that can HARM you, your family and your future family. The hormones in the dairy and meat we eat are changing the size of the human race.

Corn

Maybe you’ve heard of the chemical “Roundup”? Supposed to be one of the safest weedkillers around. So safe that chemists have genetically engineered crops like corn to be “Roundup ready”, meaning that a corn crop can be planted then when the weeds start to grow and compete with the corn, Boom, just fly by with a crop duster and spray Roundup on everything and the genetically engineered corn being resistant to the Roundup lives on while the weeds die.

Sounds great, doesn’t it. Not so much. Roundup is not just salt as we might have heard. The main component of Roundup is GLYPHOSATE. Glyphosate is a systemic chemical, which means it is absorbed into the root system of the plant. People being lazy, greedy, bastards, farmers are no exception. They found that using Roundup increased the yield of their crops and was a whole lot easier and cheaper to use. So much so that researchers can find glyphosate in RAIN and in the air and of course our ground water and streams. In 2009 the USDA says that farmers sprayed 57 million pounds of glyphosate on food crops. That alone is reason to buy and eat organic. Not convinced? I’ll proceed.

To be brief – glyphosate is a hormone-disrupting chemical. It is linked to metabolic damage, infertility, obesity, learning disabilities and birth defects. Need More? Really? If you are smugly thinking that you are a meat eater and don’t eat much corn, think again. Most cattle are raised on CORN and that corn is Roundup ready. Don’t believe me – take a trip to Nebraska.

In fact if you live in a corn growing state like Nebraska, you are drinking glyphosate in your household water unless you have a granular activated carbon filter to remove it.

We are eating Crap!

I’m not just being crude. Human sewage sludge is used as fertilizer in farm fields. Yes, that is a potential source of salmonella out breaks or worse. I make this point because another huge problem is hormone-disrupting phthalates which are very common fragrance chemicals used in soaps and shampoos. Phthalates are being found inside our produce and the only reasonable source is the sewage sludge. EAT ORGANIC- the use of human sewage is banned in organic farming.

Fat and don’t know why?

May be you eat too much. But maybe it is the pesticides that are making us fat. Even in very low doses, pesticides tamper with our body’s natural weight loss chemistry. These are also linked to cancer and type 2 diabetes, go figure.

The nice thing is that eating organic for just five days can rid the body of virtually all pesticide residues.

What to avoid?

More reasons

Pesticides can interfere with your vitamin D levels. Organophosphates are a class of pesticides that include 20 or more different pesticides and account for more than 70 percent of the pesticides used in the US. It is known that these pesticides interfere with the body’s ability to metabolize vitamin D. D, known as the sunshine vitamin protects us from cancer, diabetes, infections, heart desease, broken bones and boosts our immune system.

Feed Lot Farming – now this is a story in its own right, but hopefully you’ll read it anyhow. Feed lots are a farming method to raise a large number of cattle or fowl in a small space. The animals are herded into tightly packed pens or corals. They are fed in situations that force the animals to eat their own feces. These “Lots” are so filthy the farmers inject low levels of antibiotics into the animals to keep them health, which in turn end up in the meat we eat and cause antibiotic resistance in humans. All mass produced animals including cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs, dairy cattle and sheep are raised this way. In such conditions pests can also be a problem, so farmers spray the herd or flock with pesticides which also get into their food.

Conditions are so bad that e.coil bacteria is a problem, so to prevent it from getting into the food supply, after slaughter, one method is to wash chickens in a chlorine bath that contains 30 times more chlorine than a swimming pool. To mask the chlorine odor and supposedly to keep the bird moist while cooking, the chickens are then injected with a solution of water and phosphate. Phosphate can increase our risk of kidney disease, weak bones and even cause premature aging.

Need more reasons?

I’ve just added three new potato, potato/onion recipes that I think you are going to really like. These will give you a little something to bite into. Just click on the link recipe name for the full recipe. – Jug

This post is a follow up to my poorly researched story on buying organically grown foods. I’d like to point out and clarify a few things. First I’d like to introduce you to the dirty dozen and the clean 15. The 12 foods with the most and the 15 with the least pesticide residue according to www.whfoods.org. Here is the complete story:

Q – Can I effectively wash off pesticides from my conventionally grown fruits and vegetables?

If pesticides are present on the surfaces of your fruits and vegetables, you can definitely remove a substantial amount of those surface pesticides through careful washing and light scrubbing. However, you cannot remove all of them nor can you remove pesticides that have been incorporated into the fruits and vegetables while they were growing.

From field to field and from year to year, the amount of pesticides used on different fruit and vegetable crops can vary greatly. However, some environmental organizations, like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) headquartered in Washington, D.C., have sampled large groups of fruits and vegetables to determine which non-organic foods most consistently contain pesticide residues (and how many different residues they contain). To see more details about the EWG pesticide measurement process, you can visit the EWG website at: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary The worst offenders in the group have sometimes been tagged with the name, “Dirty Dozen.” They named another group the “Clean 15” which are the ones that were found to have the least amount of pesticide residues. Following are the “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean 15” as found in their 2011 report.

On its website, the EWG reminds all of us that when it comes to fruits and vegetables, it would be most important for us to purchase organic when we are dealing with the “Dirty Dozen” because these fruits and vegetables had the most problem with pesticide residues. However, on our World’s Healthiest Foods website we go one step further and encourage you to purchase organically grown produce whenever possible. If organic options are not available, you’re likely to lower your exposure to potentially harmful pesticides if you select from the “Clean 15” versus “Dirty Dozen” end of the EWG spectrum of fruits and vegetables. But remember that all non-organically grown foods can differ dramatically in their pesticide residues and that your best bet is to choose from organically grown foods that cannot by law be treated with the vast majority of synthetic pesticides.

Jughandle says, That is all I’m posting on this subject today. This will be an on going study for the Fat Farm. But I and the Farm are now completely converted and true believers of buying organic when ever possible. I’m not surprised I’ve had cancer twice, with this information.